


Ship of Theseus

by Ixchel_Anima



Category: SOMA (Video Game)
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Dissociation, Gen, Gore, Isolation, Other, Solitary Confinement, of sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:07:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28692192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ixchel_Anima/pseuds/Ixchel_Anima
Summary: The dead man found on the climber this morning has been identified as Johan Ross.
Relationships: Johan Ross & Raleigh Herber, Johan Ross & WAU
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Ship of Theseus

**Author's Note:**

> Oh no, another Ross POV fic from me. Just a brief reminder to familiarize yourself with the tags if you haven't already, as this does get squeamish in places.

Glasser was torn to shreds a mere 10-second sprint from the climber. It had been right in front of them, cloaked in the inky blackness of the abyss.

The last few seconds stretched into infinitum. By the time Ross collapsed on the rusted stairwell he could hardly breathe, unable to hear anything through the blood pounding in his ears and his own ragged wheezing. He couldn’t tell if it was the crushing pressure, or a sickly cocktail of acute panic and shock that was squeezing his chest like a vice, but he felt like he was on fire, vision closing in like jaws about to snap shut.

He couldn’t fail. Not now.

Ross scrabbled forward half-standing half-crawling as he groped around for the door, practically falling inside when it gave way under his weight. He risked a glance back, to the dim beacon of light bobbing somewhere on the path behind him, growing ever fainter as the endless dark swallowed it whole.

His heart stuttered.

Ross kicked the door shut behind him. Whatever killed Glasser hadn’t followed, the only evidence it had been there at all the globs of blood that swam in his vision - coated his Haimatsu Power Suit in a sickly red veneer. 

He crawled away from the edge of the cage. The walls gave his racing mind a safe purchase to cling to, miles away from the phantom stab of teeth his mind conjured when he looked back out into the dark. Ross knew rationally that he was no less exposed than he had been moments before in his mad dash from Tau, but the relief, however small, was intoxicating.

The cage was designed for holding humans. It was not built to withstand a siege; anything that truly wanted to get him could, and would. 

Something like the thing that had killed-

_Killed-_

“ _Oh, God.”_ Ross breathed. “Glass.”

Steve Glasser was dead.

Seeing the man come to pieces in front of him hadn’t been enough, somehow; now at the bottom of the ocean, alone, the other man’s absence echoed an eerie silence, deafening in its finality. How could it be that just a few moments ago, he’d been yelling encouragements, goading him onwards with a steady patience even as Ross lost his nerve? 

_(Can’t Fail.)_

_(Can’t. Fail.)_

Ross laid on his side. The climber’s seating may well have been on the surface, for how far away it felt, his entire body turned to liquid.

_(Can’t Can’t Can’t.)_

No matter. This part of the journey would take care of itself.

Exhaustion sunk into his very skin. Ross couldn’t tell if it was the encroaching darkness or the pull of unconsciousness as his eyes began to slip shut, somehow impossibly heavy. He could hear the roar of the ocean currents as it grew ever distant - the shifting metal of the climber quiet like the creaking of floorboards, like a child afraid of waking their parents in the middle of the night.

His mind drifted.

And then there was nothing.

  
  


\- 001% -

  
  


It wasn’t an awakening, it was a slow drip to awareness, like the gradual retreat of pins and needles as blood returned to limb.

He wasn’t a body, or even a person. He was Johan Ross. 

He was floating, suspended as if in open water, devoid of temperature or sensation, the space loose and shifting and dream-like - locked somewhere between reaching out and crawling back inward to hide. It was a moment never-ending, stretching unbroken for an indeterminate length of time, with no point of reference - nothing to return to or move toward.

All he could confidently tell about the experience was that it was wrong. If it was a lucid dream, he couldn’t escape it or bend the reality to his will. Ross wasn’t sure how long it had been before he realized fully that he couldn’t even _see_ \- before he was suddenly overtaken by a terror that threatened to swallow him whole. But not even the stab of panic had a nesting place, firing out everywhere at once and nowhere as he probed around blindly for a sense of connection to something, any kind of experience he could grip onto and say was real.

Something finally reached back.

The nothing was replaced by everything. A sprawling filigree of electric and number, the mass of circuitry pulsating as if flesh - as if it had a heart that could beat and pump blood and give life. For a moment, it was as if it were his.

Ross realized numbly that he hadn’t been floating at all. It was more a detachment or an absence of communication than a sense of suspension; he still was anchored in his own body - in a little box, looking out - just as he had always been. The thought electrified him with a thrill of fear, and he found himself unable to trace the path back into the vessel he called Himself, make skin touch surface or obey his commands to move, _please God, move_ -

He wondered if he was merely paralysed. Locked inside his own body; it was somehow less terrifying than the alternative. 

But even Ross knew that that explanation was not enough.

There was a give, an opening, somewhere - but it wasn’t _in_ him, or in his body. It was environmental, if you could call it that. There were roads carved in circuitry, connections he couldn’t feel or touch but nonetheless knew were there, sitting just outside his cone of perception. There was simply nowhere else to go. 

So he went.

It wasn’t sight, but it may as well have been. Pictures suddenly shifted into focus inside his minds eye and Ross felt as though he could see absolutely everything. He was looking from above in some places, at screens in another, the pictures painting Omicron in ways he had never seen it before. If he centred his attention on only one of these things it was almost like he was staring out of the window of human eyes; instead of moving them, he simply pivoted focus to the next viewpoint, and the next, in a manner that was almost comforting in how mundane it was.

Another, more terrifying realization swam just at the edge of his awareness though, like a shadow in the corner of his eye. He wasn’t ready to see it - but he knew what it was. The possible explanations for what he was experiencing were all leading down a singular path: one he had predicted months prior.

Ross needed more data.

His first conclusion: he was in Omicron. The viewpoint was a strange one, but he recognized the place well enough.

Extrapolating from that further, he concluded he'd made it up the climber, and either came inside under his own power or had been carried. At some point… _This_ had happened. His memory didn’t give him anything else.

Ross couldn’t be his brain scan either - at least not the one Catherine had taken - remembering the trek from Tau too vividly. He flicked to another camera.

_(of course they’re cameras, what else could they be?_ )

In the med bay there was a man, asleep or dead, staff swarming around him, moving quickly and methodically as they worked as if a shoal of fish. He knew who the man was. He wished he didn’t.

But that didn’t prove anything yet.

The scene changed. Ross found himself confronted by great walls of text and code, and it doesn’t take long to find the confirmation he’d been searching for in the most recent document:

_“The dead man found on the climber this morning has been identified as Johan Ross, the A.I. Psychologist working at Tau.”_

Ross reads and re-reads, and then reads it again, to make sure. He doesn’t know what to think.

_“I can’t even begin to imagine what has happened down in the abyss and frankly I won’t risk losing my staff by going down there to look-”_

It was like reading a stranger’s obituary, a clinical report of a tragedy with unknown cause. It said nothing of _him_ , simply that he presumably was and then suddenly wasn’t, catalogued alongside the other mutant curiosities that had been dredged up around Omicron - the discovery isn't any where near as alarming as he thought it would be.

And in the face of several billion casualties already, why would another body on the pile be anything else?

Stranded as he was, there was no chemical signals to fire, no-where to feel the acid burn of fear as his sick stomach rose into his throat - no myocardial knife to the chest as the truth finally began to sink in, drowning him in a panic. Of course there was no where - he was dead. Dying was supposed to be a bigger deal than this - why wasn't it a bigger deal? Ross couldn’t move past the numb surprise, no longer equipped to feel the full horror in the way that he wanted to - needed to.

But he was still _here._

It could have easily just been denial, but he couldn't help begging the question. Something was _wrong._

_He was still here!_ Shut off from his body as Ross was, he knew he still had a mind - knew he was having thoughts, the one thing he couldn’t doubt. Everything else was secondary to the reality that he was still experiencing _something,_ that he still existed, in the most basic sense of the word. He couldn’t be _dead._

No, he couldn’t be dead. Death went against WAU’s protocol. There was no death down here - not while he was on this pseudo life support, that didn’t so much preserve life as imprison him in its casings. It was the only explanation.

The WAU had intervened, as if it was making sure Ross knew that his mission had failed before his true end came. It was hard not to anthropomorphize its intentions, frame the A.I. as a foe that needed vanquishing; the reality was harder to face up to, somehow, and even he understood how unreasonable his anger was as it simmered somewhere just below tangible, a pot on the edge of boiling over. There was no malicious intent at play, really - nothing to reason with. Just the inevitability of a program that was never designed to cope with an apocalypse.

His shock felt unearned. Ross knew this could happen, made detailed predictions on this exact outcome, but he'd held onto the hope that his fears would only stay as abstracts before - death was always something that happened to other people and not you, after all. To someone less versed in the technology, the WAU's performance could be easily mistaken for sentimentality - and why _wouldn’t_ it save its only overseer? If not for the abject horror of his situation he’d simply be fascinated. A.I. Psychologist becomes A.I., a very literal ghost in the machine.

Ross imagined himself snapping out of it, pulling himself to his feet and out of the sea of self-pity and fear he’d been wallowing in. He ran through the motions in his head: he’d make some tea, and sit down - 

_(he’d hold a cup of hot water and pretend everything hadn’t run out months ago, just focus on the warmth-)_

\- and maybe he’d be able to sit with the others in silence, and they could all pretend together, for just a bit longer, that there was a way out. They'd talk and they'd reminisce like nothing had changed - like there was still a surface they could return to one day, that even if they were rescued they weren't just on borrowed time. There had to be a way out.

His mind returned to the reason he’d come to Omicron in the first place, his worries about his own sense of being suddenly very petty in comparison.

Regardless of what he was, there were still real, living people at stake. So long as he was here in limbo, he had a duty to fulfil - at least everyone else still had a chance of making it. Ross moved, experimentally. The image that flashed in the back of his mind shifted - he tried to imagine that it was the same as using a pilot seat, using the machine as an extension of yourself. 

It was nothing like using a pilot seat, of course. But pretending made the dissonance sting just a little less.

  
  


\- 005% -

  
  


Time passed with or without him. The end of the world didn’t stop the ticking of the system’s internal clocks, and Ross found himself checking regularly as soon as he realized it was an option. He likened it to keeping track of the surface weather while he worked down in the Abyss, in the times way before the Impact Event, down in a place where weather patterns scarcely existed - it was a simple ritual that made him feel tethered to the rest of humankind, somehow. He knew those times as good times, now. Even then it was easy to forget that there was a world outside PATHOS-II.

_(Was.)_

Sometimes he still liked to believe that there might be.

It had been six days since he had died. The New Year had already come and gone in his absence; he wondered if they’d celebrated in Omicron, if there even was anything to celebrate. The anniversary of the Impact Event was in just over a week. It had been the longest year of his life.

3rd of January, 2104. It was a Thursday.

Sometimes Ross felt like he was in his body again, like a sleep paralysis in reverse, brief, and too fleeting. Shapes danced across his eyelids. Voices swam around him. And sometimes there was nothing at all - a complete disconnect, a micro-death.

He noticed a new log; there was heavy interference around the med-bay they were keeping his body in, the technology behaving strangely. The amplified signals were messing with both the computers and staff alike. Despite how odd the electrical interference must've been to the staff still alive, as far as Ross was concerned the WAU was behaving exactly as expected given the circumstances. It was a waiting game now: either Ross, himself and whole, would rise from the dead, or only his body would, leaving the real him behind. If he even was the real him - it scarcely seemed to matter.

Time was running short. He couldn’t trust the WAU to bring him back correctly.

He needed to make them listen. They _would_ listen to him.

  
  


\- 008% -

  
  


It came in waves.

The pulses of electromagnetism ebbed and flowed like the pull of a tide, Ross' awareness lapping at the corners of the station he hadn’t managed to reach before in his dreaming state. It had been a few days, now. The tide seemed to go out further and further every day.

There was an emerging landscape in Omicron, one that he was slowly beginning to map. Easiest to access were what he understood to be computers and tablets, mostly filled with research papers and personal files, occasionally interspersed with huge, sprawling knots of data and processing Ross understood to be the quiet omnipresence of the WAU as it worked in the background. On the other end of the spectrum were tiny moving targets of BPMs and body temperature and brain activity. In other words: people.

Ross could sense them buzzing over him, sometimes, with no clear idea of what they were doing or who they were, though he could make guesses. It was maddening, their mere proximity overwhelming all else. He’d lost track of the times he’d tried to talk to them, will words back into his mouth and translate them back into this language he couldn’t seem to speak any more. It wasn’t their fault they weren’t listening - he simply had no way of saying anything - but the frustration burned hot regardless. 

Ross didn’t believe in ghosts, yet here he was, trapped on the other side of the veil, cut off from the living.

But if it was a mere veil, then perhaps it was a thin one.

He felt like a toddler, trying to walk for the first time. It was like sending out ripples in a pool of water - he’d reach out and the systems would recoil, a hand jumping away from a flame, the words and images contorting horribly. The longer he was trapped like this the more the writhing mass of electrics behaved as if an extension of himself - more like a body than his actual body, dead and unreachable. 

_LISTEN TO ME_

It was like learning to breathe after a panic - a recalibration of the self, bringing systems right back down to normal. This was now normal.

And maybe the swell of the EM pulses could be just a little bit like breathing, like the mechanical exchange of air in a dead lung. Maybe if he pretended.

That had to be enough.

Ross felt nothing. There was nowhere for the feeling to go - but he felt in control for the first time since his death. It was a good feeling.

  
  


\- 015% -

  
  


Reports about his current state of being were increasingly conflicting. Ross had been described as dead, then comatose, and then dead again. He'd catch snippets of conversation and documentation here and there, all signs pointing to his messages being recieved but not understood, or, worse - outright dismissed. They didn't know it, but they had the solution already, locked in a chilled cabinet. It was torturous. If only they would _listen._

Even Dahl wasn't responding. She worked for Carthage too, knew about Alpha - her of all people must've known that the messages could've only been from him, the real _him_ , so why wasn't she listening? It was excruciating, the void in communication. All he needed was one thing, one tiny indication that she'd heard, or even _seen_ his pleas for help, or even cared remotely about what was happening around her - what had happened to him. When he eventually found the reason for her lack of response, though, he wished he hadn't. Of course Dahl was never going to help him - since the failed evac, she'd written off any more trips to the abyss entirely.

She'd left them all to die.

In any other circumstances, learning that someone he considered a friend had done that would've disturbed him - unsettled him, left him feeling angry, betrayed.

But like this? There was nothing.

So he tried elsewhere.

_LISTEN TO ME_

The screen fractured, and words spilled out of the open wounds. The screen bled: reds and magentas and blacks and cyans.

Ross heard a voice drift down the dispatch channels, as if he were just in another room, listening in. It was all so obvious, when seen through the lens of hindsight; the communications channels were the perfect medium, if he can only figure out how to project into them. It could be done - yes, there _had to_ be a way of doing it.

In the meantime, the compromise he arrived at was more than he could've originally hoped for. There had to be _someone_ willing to listen ; then again, if Ross caught himself believing a dead man was using computers to talk to him, he'd probably just assume there was a gas leak.

_TAKE THE GEL_

_INTO THE ABYSS_

_TAKE IT TO ALPHA  
_

_IN THE ABYSS_

Contact was made two days later.

A word processor opened one of the distpatch room screens, empty for what seemed like an eternity. There is a hesitation, the beginnings of words hastily erased, and then written again, before a sentence was tentatively typed.

“What are you talking about?”

\- 017% -

  
  


The woman was called Raleigh Herber. 

As he suspected, she was the Omicron dispatcher - though the two had crossed paths briefly during work to relay messages, they had never talked properly. Still hadn’t, really. Whatever this was probably didn’t count.

_THE WAU IS SICK_

“The WAU needs... medicine.”

Ross had to commend her patience - it was barely more efficient than just using an ouija board. He could hear her muttering to herself down the radio line and the frantic scribble of pen on paper, unsure of how he could even register the sounds in his current state. Given that, he didn't think it was wholly unreasonable for him to continue in his attempts to speak - actually _speak -_ though by her lack of reaction he knew that whatever he was doing wasn't working. His thoughts were very much the same internal dialogue as ever - but how to project them outward?

Ross couldn't believe he was sincerely attempting telepathy, but in the meantime, digital ouija board it was.

_YES_

The messages were frustratingly short. The result was closer to a game of charades than a productive conversation, and the mental effort of sending even these signals was immense, but it was the only solution he had. Remembering that he was lucky to reconnect with the living at all did little to soothe Ross' impatience, especially when it seemed to be getting him nowhere fast - but it wasn't Raleigh's fault. She was the only one who seemed to hear him. He would have to trust her.

_TAKE THE GEL TO ALPHA_

A response slowly appeared on the screen again, seemingly quicker and more confident with every exchange. "And where is Alpha?"

\- 018% -

Ross dreamed. Despite everything, he still dreamed, or at least thought he did, enchanted by how his dark world would suddenly grow bright when his concentration lapsed. It was tantalizingly close to a tangible reality, except in that the world would shift around him when he thought about it a bit too much, the illusion of the lucid dream distorted. Sometimes it would drop into nothingness, and he'd snap out of it, but more often the environment would bend and ripple as if it were made of water. Perhaps the ARK was just like this, kept afloat by the force of belief alone, a willingness and a want to pretend.

This time though, he was not alone.

She was a woman, hair a vibrant red. As she turned to face him he could see the spread of freckles across her pale cheeks, and Ross swore that there was recognition in her eyes as she looked right at him.

\- 030% -

Raleigh was brighter than Ross could’ve ever expected or hoped for.

Once the initial barrier was broken there was an ease and precision of conversation that could’ve only come from her years of experience in communications. Perhaps this was just another mission to her, like the days when PATHOS-II was firing satellites into space on the daily. She seemed to have an intuition for what questions to ask and how, cutting right to the heart of the matter with surgical precision, even when his mental fatigue made forming the right words difficult. Hope lifted his spirits, though, and Ross somehow felt lighter than before - not merely floating passively but rising, as if there was a surface to the space he occupied, and he could reach it and crawl out.

But there was a ceiling still, so to speak - Raleigh had never been to Alpha. His descriptions were lackluster at best: he could tell her that it was near Tau until the next apocolypse and back, but it was a poor substitute for an actual map or location. The abyss - so long as the WAU was infecting the wildlife - was lethal, and he couldn't risk her life sending her out to explore out there in the dark, especially not when she was his last shot at shutting it down.

Worse still, it was a difficult relaying that fact to her. He'd tried mentioning the evacuation in the hopes that she'd connect the dots between the abyss and the danger it posed, but it was so non-sequitur from their previous thread of conversation that he wouldn't be surprised if she never followed it up. Ross didn't even know if Raleigh was told _why_ the evac had failed.

The conversation met a dead end either way. There's another hesitation, and he can nearly imagine the expression on her face - brows knotted in concentration, nose scrunched up. She typed, deleted - and tried again.

“Do you know that you’re dead?”

It’s only text, but there’s almost a delicacy to it. Ross doesn't know when he began to perceive their communication this way, like the natural pauses and lulls of regular conversation - or perhaps it had been so long since he'd last spoken properly, that his mind was plugging the gaps with things that weren't there. After being his only mode of reaching out for so long, it felt as natural as breathing. He saw no reason not to be honest.

_YES_

The next message arrives seconds after his, excited.

“What’s it like?”

_NOT BAD_

The line warped and crackled as an outside call tried to connect with Omicron, the sensation dizzying. Somewhere, he heard Raleigh answer the caller, hearing the conversation as if someone was holding his head underwater. The lumar relays had been repaired to the best of everyones' abilities, but the audio still left a lot to be desired, the interference so thick in places you could cut it with a knife.

But in some ways, it was exactly the opening he needed - something tactile to grab onto. When the voices stopped and the line hung dead he seized it like he was a drowning man grabbing a lifebelt, wading through the thick static and trying to bend it into the right shape.

When his voice came out of the other side of the noise, Ross scarcely recognized it.

" _Raleigh_."

He got a yelp down the comms channel in reponse.

\- 060% -

“I’ve been having... Dreams. Is that you too?” Raleigh asked, absently, as she continued to scribble down notes, or doodle, or both. Their conversations had grown easy now they'd broken the sound barrier, as it were, and her progress had boiled away much of Ross' prior urgency - the pieces were in motion, now. There was an end in sight.

"I couldn't possibly say." Ross admitted. He didn't like the sound of his new voice, though it was becoming increasingly difficult to remember how it had sounded in the first place, before all this. He hoped he wouldn't have to get used to it.

Talking was still bizarre, and a part of him worried that his own train of thought would spill out unbidden if he stopped concentrating, his thoughts no longer having breathing room. It was a vast improvement on their previous communications, though - a small price to pay for the first meaningful human interaction he'd had in weeks. He noticed how Raleigh spoke only in whispers, as if she was worried that someone would walk past dispatch and hear her talking to a dead man, and he could hardly blame her for her caution. Evidently, none of the other's believed it was really him trying to reach out.

"You can, though, can't you?" There was laughter in Raleigh's voice, hazy and warm. "They started around the same time the interference did. We all noticed that much."

"... We?"

"The others have been having strange dreams too," Raleigh explained, before the beep of an incoming call sounded out in the small room. "Hang on." It's abrupt and disappointing, but the living obviously come first, so Ross withdrew from the dispatch electrics to leave her to it. It came so naturally now that he no longer thought about how absurd it all was.

Ross had theories, obviously, but the dreaming phenomena confused him as much as it seemed to Raleigh. It was an unexpected side effect of the WAU and his ressurection-in-progress, from what he could gather, and he could only assume that the blackboxes factored in somehow, being the only digital devices connecting his body to the Omicron servers. Still, the effects on dreams were unprecedented. The revelation that so many staff members were experiencing the same things Raleigh was, and didn't act on it, was dismaying to say the least. It certainly gave him extra motivation to return to the land of the living - spite was as good a reason as any to stay alive.

The call ended, and the conversation whipped back to where it had just been before.

“I’ve got the uncalibrated structure gel from Eames, by the way. I’ll be taking it down tomorrow.” There's some noise in the background as Raleigh gathered up her things - the clink of a ceramic mug against metal, the clattering of pens and pencils as she bundled them together. "I bet the ARK team will be glad to see me. Tau too, I hope."

The words felt like a hot drink on a cold day. 

"You have no idea how grateful I am for this, Raleigh."

"I think I have a good idea." He heard her rise from her seat, the faintest trepidation in her voice as she spoke again. "I need let some people know I'll be gone, if you'll give me a minute. Maybe I'll see you when I get back from Alpha?"

Ross certainly hoped so.

\- 062% -

Being moved to isolation came as no shock - it had been forewarned by Lanksy's digital notes weeks prior, and when Ross' connection to the computer systems was abruptly severed, it doesn't incite panic the way he figured it ought to. The field of view darkened and he was floating in the nothing again, the circuitry he'd made a home in nothing but a speck on the distant horizon, out of sight and out of reach. Maybe he'd finally move on now, like a ghost after their affairs were tied up with a neat bow.

Raleigh was going to take care of everything. Ross hadn’t realized how much the WAU had dominated his thoughts until its absence left a vacuum he wasn’t sure how to fill again, if it even needed filling. There was nothing more he could do.

No matter what came next, Ross felt as if he could cope with the outcome. Death was unfortunate, but an inevitable side effect of living, and he had already had a better run than most. Even if he were to miraculously wake now, his time was borrowed: he had no doubt that Raleigh would succeed. She had to.

He wasn't happy - happiness was a feeling that had no were to live, but there was a contentedness in the easy silence of his mind, and a sense of closure that made him feel infinitely better about the end to come. It was the 15th of January. He felt as if he was taking a final stroll through a library before it shut, finally giving himself permission to embrace the quiet and calm before his mind died, if it ever did. He imagined the winter sun back home, low and always too bright in the cloudless blue, and how he would miss it all the same when the rain blotted the English sky in black and grey.

Ross longed for the rain. He missed the elements most of all down on the ocean floor - the rare lightning storms that would whip through the valleys where he grew up, and even the simple misery of waking up to a morning that looked as if the sun hadn’t even bothered to rise, or heat that would make him hide indoors until evening. He missed the air, cold and crisp. His last days on the surface were spent with family at the turn of the New Year, the atmosphere a mixed drink of trepidation and nervous optimism; they didn't know then that the final deflection attempts were going to fail.

Ross didn't believe in an afterlife, but it was easier to imagine than non-existance. He thought of the ARK instead, and for once did not resent that he wasn't on it.

All things considered, life had been okay.

  
  


\- 089% -

  
  


The Omicron staff had underestimated the WAU's tenacity - by the time the new day broke it had already found a way of reaching him again. Ross felt like the WAU had grabbed him and shook him out of a deep sleep. Regaining what little senses he had in the weird limbo he occupied was more reassuring than he cared to admit, even if it felt more like wading through tar than the instant information relays he had grown accustomed to. Even his own thoughts were being filtered through a thick brainfog.

To his understanding, he was insulated - or supposed to be. Either the WAU had discovered an entry point or a workaround, or it had simply accelerated the EM frequencies. To have done this so quickly, the latter was the most likely. Either way-

\- 093% -

\- that didn’t bode well.

Ross’ awareness was spreading as if setting down roots. The space around him felt as if it was vibrating, like he was drowning in feedback from a walkie talkie - an awful sound that made his temples throb with a dull pain. A knot of anxiety began to form in his chest, nerves now razor sharp.

This wasn’t right. Something wasn’t right.

_(how was he feeling-  
_

_\- 098% -_

_\- pain?)_

Ross felt as if he was on a tall building, head spinning with vertigo as he looked down to the streets below. It was amazing what the mind could conjure up all by itself, his body suddenly tight with the anticipation of phantom hands hovering over his neck. They would grip his shoulders, fall into the small of his back. And then-

then-

_then-_

**_\- 099% -_ **

He plummeted.

The floor was pulled out from the No Where he occupied. It was like falling in a dream; Ross was stuck in place but his mind didn’t know any better, and as he hit the ground his entire body contorted with a sickening lurch. 

Senses returned all at once, each one too intense and specific and overwhelming, every nerve firing with an electric static. The press of the bed against his back was as if it was stuck to a gaping wound, and he could only gasp, feeling the sharp oxygen burn as it entered his dead lungs for the first time in what must’ve been weeks. He could see light at the back of his eyelids, bright enough to be painful.

It was almost as if the walls themselves were screaming as the static wail rose to a fever pitch, a shrieking death knell that bounced off the walls and tore through the corridors. The pressure was too much. The electrics finally blew - a kaleidoscope of sparks as the station plunged into darkness. 

Somewhere in the sensory overload though there was a severance, an absence sudden and agonizing as if it were an amputated limb. 

The blackboxes were all gone.

Ross came to with a strangled scream.

  
  
  


_**\- 100% -** _

**_\- %%% -_ **

_**\- %%% -** _

He didn’t know how long it had been.

In a nightmare Ross would have the luxury of waking, but time crept forward, enduring and ever-present, the station still and locked in the same moment seemingly for eternity. The station was dark and silent. No matter how much he willed himself into an alternate chain of events nothing changed. The truth would not bend, and he was left to face the reality of what had just happened.

Dread settled low and cold in his gut. And there it stayed, coiling and squirming as if his corpse was maggot ridden - like he was being eaten alive.

_(he wasn’t alive)_

Ross wondered if this was how Glasser had felt in his final moments, seconds from safety. He wondered if the glimpse of the climber - tantalizingly, mockingly close - had hurt him more than the slice of teeth, or the violent decompression of a punctured suit. He wished more than anything that he could’ve died there and then, if only to be spared the humiliation of being brought right to the cusp of victory, only to have it blow up in his face.

If he had died down there, the WAU would still have gone out of control in his absence, unchecked, but the people of Omicron would’ve been spared. It stung all the more knowing that their deaths had sealed Tau’s fate, the abyssal station and its people as good as doomed. They deserved so much better than that.

Theta was now humanities last settlement - maybe there was still a chance.

He let himself think there was still a chance. There _had_ to still be a chance. 

Ross rolled from the bed he’d been propped up on and dropped unceremoniously to the floor, the impact making him wince through grit teeth. His legs were shaking like a newborn foal as he tried to stand. His gaze drifted slowly across the four walls of the glass box as he caught his breath, each side not much more than 3 metres wide but feeling an eternity away - every step was exhausting, sharp needles of pain shooting up his spine with each movement.

Ross braced his entire body against the glass as he tried for the door, limbs completely unwilling to support his weight. By the time he reached it he all but fell onto it, scrabbling for purchase on a lock or a handle that just wasn’t there. He pushed.

No. _No no no no no no._

“Open!” He tried to shout but couldn’t, his voice coming out cracked and garbled, rough like barbed wire.

_(from disuse, he reasoned)_

_“Come on!”_

Panic rose like bile in his throat.

“Please!”

He didn't know who he was calling out to - no one was there. He dug his fingernails into the gaps and tried to pry - tried pressing his entire body weight into the glass, pushing it, smashing it, throwing his entire weight at it. The door echoed a hollow _thuk, thuk, thuk,_ as he hit it, again, again, the glass as frozen in time and place as the rest of the station. Ross may as well have still been punching out in a dream. He wished he was.

It was locked.

It was locked and the only people able to open it were dead. 

Ross slumped onto the floor and held his head in his hands. He tried to throw himself back into that suspended state and find a way out of this, as if he could crawl through the circuits and out of confinement, but all roads seemed to lead to nowhere. Panic swirled. He couldn't think. He was going to die, he was going to fucking die alone in a cage at the bottom of the ocean. He was going to die alone and a failure and for no good reason, no reason at all.

_(he was already dead)_

"No."

That wasn't right - Ross wasn't dead. The WAU had brought him back.

The protocol demanded it.

_"No, nonono."_

Ross' hands pawed at the glass, watching them slide down as his entire body began to tremble with huge, racking sobs. A few inches of glass was all that stood between him and the other side, everything so close and so _clear_ that he felt as if he could reach out and touch it.

He wasn’t going to die in here.

He wasn’t going to starve to death alone in a cage, his only rescuers dead.

No - Ross was going to live forever.

  
  


\- %%% -

  
  


Hope was a temporary salve, but a salve nonetheless. Ross couldn’t help gnawing on that bone during the following days, his panic briefly sated by the idea that there would be a way out of this, just like there had been before. The idea of rescue was a hard one to let go of. It was naive, but it meant that the sick feeling simmered just below the surface, manageable.

The comms had been spared in the outage, but the lockdown meant that anything actually useful was frustratingly out of reach. The Omicron substation was still in range, but it was as good as useless given his circumstances. Quarantine meant that anything that needed rebooting, needed rebooting manually, and that help would have to contact him, and not the other way around. It was very much like being stranded at Tau again. They had waited, before. They had waited, and the ARK team had come for them, well after they'd already lost all hope. Maybe there could be a proverbial second coming.

His eyes searched the room, barely lit enough to make out anything specific - only enough that the strange shadows and machines bent into unfamiliar shapes when he stared at them for too long. The glass room felt like a panopticon - exposed on all sides, watched by the tricks of the light and the faceless omnipresence of the WAU. The silence was so total that every creak was startling.

He couldn't bear to stay here. He hoped it wouldn't be long, Theta must have noticed, somehow, that Omicron had slipped into radio silence.  


Ross bunkered down and tried to sleep.

  
  


\- %%% -

  
  


Someone did come.

Theta came - a small handful of them. The tug of the blackbox signals as they approached woke Ross from his fitful sleep, and they rushed towards the entrance. He observed, blearily, as they tried the next, and then, in desperation, the substation. There was no power in the substation; the realization felt like a bolt of lightning.

Their oxygen levels dipped below normal, then into low, then to critical, one by one. The life signs began to disappear, as if dropping off of a radar.

_Why were they not going back to Theta?_

Helplessness swallowed Ross yet again. So long as the lockdown was in effect there was no power to the doors - without a manual override, he was in no position to help any of them. He heard himself cry out, as if they could maybe hear him, the sound reverberating in the tiny space. What a waste, what a fucking waste of life this all was. What a waste of hope, waiting for people that came to Omicron only to die - that he thought for even a moment that the universe wasn't done screwing him yet. What had happened at Theta that was so awful that they dare not even try to return to it?

They were going to die out there. They _were_ dying out there.

He curled up on the bed and tried to look away as his last hope died out like a dimming flame.

\- %%% -

Time passed, nothing but a meaningless slide of the calendar now. By the time Ross willed himself to check again it had slipped into late January, the longest month of his life.

There really was nothing left to do.

Ross tried to place himself in Glasser’s shoes again, as if willing it enough would make reality click back into the correct place, like he could change it like he had the dreams and the computers. None of the timelines were good, just better.

Glasser wouldn’t die on the climber, not like Ross had. He would live long enough to relay Ross’ last wish, and then for many years after; Sarang would descend into the dark, and carry out his work. Twisting the fiction more, his colleagues at Tau and the ARK team would be spared, no longer doomed to suffer a slow death from starvation as Ross very nearly had himself.

Ross wasn’t dead- 

_(he was not allowed to die)_

-but it was a death of sorts. There was nowhere to go from here, for him or humanity at large - if the population was at a bottleneck before, there was no way of truly coming back from the additional losses. He wondered if the WAU knew the trade-off it was making when it sent out the final EM pulse; if it was a calculated risk or a roll of the dice, unable to override its own protocol to keep humans alive at any cost - to revive him, even at the cost of humanity itself. It could not think. It did not feel - Ross knew that more than anyone. Thinking about it all too much left him cold with fury and despair, more than it did inspire a rage that burned hot, purposeful. Getting angry at the WAU was no more productive than getting angry at his own cells for turning cancerous, for spreading over his body and choking the life out of his organs, a waste of feeling and energy.

Still, he couldn’t stop thinking: would the WAU count this as a success? 

He asked it anyway, because he could, hearing his voice bounce off of the glass walls of his prison. It didn’t answer. It didn’t know he was calling it.

The WAU was not sentient. Thousands of years of philosphy still couldn't explain the human experience, humanity a goalpost ever moving and fluid across different people and populations, and yet humanity was something so _inherent_ that it was a concept universally understood without word or direction. How could Ross ever hope to teach something that wasn't human _that?_

He wished he could forgive the WAU for not knowing any better. He wished he could forgive himself.

  
  


\- %%% -

  
  


Dreaming was pleasant, and never long enough. Sometimes he returned to that suspended state, but more often Ross was thrown back in time. 

In the vivid microseconds that passed before he returned to the waking world he swore it was all real. He breathed and the air was crisp, cleansing. It was cold, but never freezing - how could it be, between the bonfire and the warmth of good company, the press of a crowd, or the burn of alcohol?

It was simple and it was silly. He knew these people, and he knew he loved them, and that was enough.

Ross would wake and the feeling would slip through his hands like sand on a rocky shore. 

He had never dreamed like this when he was still alive. If it was a property of the structure gel or the WAU he had no real way of confirming it or testing it, and no matter how long he chased down a motive for the WAU to do this deliberately none of the conclusions were satisfying. The protocol evolving down this particular route didn't make sense. Just like killing all of Omicron, it had to be unintentional.

Ross dreamed again. It was about the only thing to look forward to, once reading the wealth of logs and documents the Omicron staff had left behind had grown stale. It was a placebo he took eagerly, whenever his body would allow him sleep again.

Sometimes he'd return to Oxford, where he'd spent most of his study years, to limestone streets that swelled with tourists, and quaint, narrow corridors that were somehow left barren no matter the time of year. Or up one of the many mountain paths one of his exes had taken him over when they were both a lot younger, the steep, grassy corridors all somehow burned into his mind even now, places that always left him in awe of the simple privilege of being alive and able to witness their little world.

But more and more often he found himself in the Tau common room, some time before the end of the world saw them all slowly starve to death. Ross could sit with them, and he could listen to Auclair and Coetzee argue ballistics, or Glasser go off on long tangents about how fucked up these new jellyfish he'd found were - and maybe Ross would even join in with them. And he'd be perfectly content, just like that, until it was time to wake again.

It had been too short, all of it.

Ross woke, and checked the system clocks. It was February the 2nd. About 1am.

He sat on the edge of the bed and began the long wait until sleep took him again.

  
  


\- %%% -

  
  


When his daily ritual of rummaging through the detritus of Omicron’s servers was over, Ross had taken to watching the dark roots of structure gel spread across his containment room.

Watching was a loose term - it didn’t move. At least, it didn’t seem to until when he next looked back. It wasn’t as if he had anything to take notes with or anywhere put his observations for future reference; he’d simply make a mental note and hope that it was a trustworthy one when he next thought to check again. And just like going back over his own shorthand in life, it wasn’t always easy to know what he had meant in the first place.

_(And sometimes when the glass caught the dim light, he’d see something that wasn’t quite him. Something alien-)_

The knots of WAU growth had begun to spread from the floor above the containment room to around his cage, like it was trying to reach out and grab him - swallow him whole. Maybe it would constrict the glass like a coiling snake and shatter his prison.

He numbly took inventory of the changes as they happened around him. The WAU continued in its slow exploration around the box, and he realized gradually that if the glass didn’t shatter under the weight or pressure, then the structure gel threatened to close him in entirely. Ross was surprised how much the thought frightened him, the thought of losing the tiny slither of Omicron he could still see with his eyes too much to bear. The horror was twofold - in it's inevitablity, and in the grim certainty Ross felt that he'd still be alive to witness it when it finally happened.

It could take years.

It seemed fitting, somehow; the WAU was burying him alive, little by little, and in its feverish attempt to reach him it risked entombing him permanently.

  
  


\- %%% -

  
  


Ross checked Omicron’s life support systems on a whim.

_(a need for some kind of mental stimulation)_

_(anything to break up the hours)_

_(or perhaps to silence a quiet suspicion)_

The WAU was no longer providing oxygen - it hadn't for days. He tracked the graph, tracing back it mentally as it dipped following his revival, and then dropped through the floor shortly after. Given the low energy state the WAU had defaulted to after the Impact Event, it must've cut off supply in response to the Omicron deaths to conserve power, sensing no one inside that was in need of it.

But it didn’t make sense.

What was he breathing, if not oxygen?

\- %%% -

Ross saw the stranger in the glass again.

It stared back with hollow eyes and a sunken face. It was naked; its skin pulled taut over bone, blackened and blistered as if burnt, and great coiled snakes of structure gel nested in its empty chest cavity and wound down its limbs, straining against the thin layers of famished flesh. Ross reached out to his own arms with an unsteady hand, mapping the bumps on his wrist and forearms, to the knots of cancerous growth and shrapnel that wove into his bicep.

He didn't dare look at what he was touching.

_(He was imagining it, he had to be.)_

He just watched the creature as it mirrored his own movements precisely; it dug its nails into its skin, and dragged it back as if peeling back the layers on a wrapped parcel, the leathered flesh coming away too easily. Ross hissed in pain, breath quickening. His fingertips touched metal, warming under the spread of blood. He just needed to know if it was real, any kind of proof.

_(Of course it was real, something wasn't right - he'd known for a long time that something wasn't right-)_

He shut his eyes and counted to 10.

Ross opened his eyes and looked down to his arms, sullen and too thin, slick with a deep crimson that caked his fingernails and ran down his arm in thick globs. He felt the steady throb of the open wound. His eyes moved up to meet the man in the reflection, dragging over the glass as if making the slow, excruciating walk to his own execution.

Ross stared at himself.

Perfectly human. Him and the reflection both.

He was losing his fucking mind.

\- %%% -

In the early days of spring Ross gets a call. He caught it on the third ring, delirious from excitement and anxiety. He looked to the caller ID: Theta. He'd written them all off as dead, before, after the incident outside - how stupid could he have been to have done that? Humanity was nothing if not tenacious, naturally they'd manage to hang on in Theta.

_(There might still be life in Theta. There might still be life in Theta-)_

"Hello?"

The sound of another person's voice nearly made him weep. They had an accent Ross couldn't quite place immediately, though he had definitely heard it before; it could've been anyone, but he didn't care who it was, as long as it was _someone_.

"Hello? Hello!" Ross' own voice sounded foreign to him as it crackled down the line, deeper than he remembered - perhaps it was just the medium he was using to talk distorting it, or disuse. It scarcely mattered. "This is Dr. Johan Ross, I'm stuck in Omicron, and-"

"Hello -this - this is-" The man's voice was swallowed up by thick static. Ross swore, drawing frantic circles in the floor as he paced around his cell and willed the the line to hold, as if he could grab it with both hands and keep it in place himself. "Fuck-" The man cursed, before mumbling something he couldn’t decipher.

"Don't hang up. Don't - don't hang up. Listen to me." Ross sounded desperate even to his own ears, voice cracking, every second that wasn't filled with the other man's voice like torture. "Say something."

“-This is Strasky, Dispatcher at Theta - is anyone else there?"

"Just me- there's-" Ross knew that name. He'd heard it before, but his racing mind wasn't giving him any answers. "-Something happened. Everyone at Omicron is dead, I'm trapped in here." His words tumbled over each other, insensate in his attempts to get the message out before the line stammered again. "I need. I need you to manually override the power in the substation outside Omicron, there's a quarantine in force and I can't get out, _please_ -"

_"Dead?_ What are you-"

Ross took a breath. One, two. "Where are you, Strasky?"

“What kind of question is that?" The man mumbled, distant, like he couldn’t hear anything Ross was saying. "Somethings... Somethings not right, it's like a ghost-town up here, but I guess no one else is here yet but us. I keep calling but no one-"

Interference cut Strasky off again, his voice a low level, incomprehensible murmur on the other end of the receiver. Strasky’s voice was miles away - quiet, trance-like.

“- rythings so quiet. I didn’t expect the ARK to be this quiet-”

Ross’ whole body turned to ice. He heard himself gasp, a sputtering, hollow sound - utterly unrecognizable. The communications line hummed a gentle harmony of white noise and static as neither man spoke - neither dared to name the horrible, unspoken truth of their situation; Ross took a few moments to steady his rapid breathing, certain the other man could hear it too. Any reply died in his throat.

Before he could try again the line snapped, and all that was left of the other man was the gentle wail of a lost connection.

The silence that followed was absolute, just like it had been after he'd woken up for the first time again. Ross had no way of calling back, even if he wanted to. 

The solitude stung, but it was a familiar sting by now. It didn't hurt like listening to Strasky's doppelgänger, the voice making him feel cold in the same way that a house left abandoned was cold - hollow and infested. This was exactly what he had been so desperate to prevent before. His chest felt like it had been filled with lead - he wondered if Strasky was in the same position he was, trapped and yearning for a connection. Did he know yet that he wasn't the real Strasky? That his scan was not on the ARK like Dr Chun had promised?

_(he was not real)_

_(not like Ross was)_

_(wasn't he?)_

No one would be coming for either of them.

\- %%% -

  
Checking dispatch became like a tic. Once Ross started, he couldn't stop doing it, switching back down the line whenever there was a gap in his train of thought that needed filling, which turned out to be most of the time. There was no way of calling back. It had been days. He probably wasn't getting any other callers, but chasing that slim slither of hope was addictive. Distracting, if only for a couple of seconds.

The absence of stimulus meant that he had ample time to think about himself, and Ross absolutely did not want to think about himself. He hadn't thought of his body much while he was cut off from it - it had been somewhat of a blessing, in hindsight. It was rare to think of his body at all, really, even when human, until things started going wrong; little twinges of pain, aches and injuries - even something like a cold could easily dominate his thoughts with trivial concerns: scratchy voices, sore throats and fatigue. Scaled up to whatever affliction it was that was plaguing him now, it was nigh impossible to ignore the discomfort. The pain was persistent but low level, most of the time, and seemingly everywhere at once, occasionally spiking into a crawling, ever spreading agony that could take hours to abate.

Ross thought it was hunger at first. He hadn't eaten in months, and even before he and Glasser made a run for the climber he stood on the dangerous side of malnourished. It was a natural assumption - the WAU wouldn't allow him to succumb to starvation, no matter how bad it got.

_(or how much he wished he would)_

It was uncomfortable, but bearable - until it wasn't.

It was like something had made its home inside his flesh, tunneling under his skin, alive and writhing. Ross tried to walk it out like a cramp, reminiscent of the growing pains he'd experienced during his teens - it would come and go, like all the other times this had happened. But this time the feeling did not fade. It really did feel like something was _moving_. But it couldn't be, surely - if there were flies or maggots or worse he'd have noticed them by now, inside his little cell, and he didn't want to think of what else it could be, whether it was his own body, putrefying and fetid, or something different - something alien. Something that wasn't his.

Ross pressed fingertips into his bare stomach. They did not touch skin. The thick cable of structure gel recoiled from him like a startled snake, and he jumped back from himself too - he looked down and his entire torso seemed to shift and disort as if underwater. Of course it wasn't hunger, of course - the WAU was _his_ caretaker now, keeping him alive. His dead organs were no use to him or the algorithm anymore, they must need replacing if the WAU was going to stand any chance of keeping him alive-

The glass cage seemed to spin.

When Ross next came to he was on the floor of his cell, a smear of blood next to his head where it had hit metal.

\- %%% -

Ross could hear a scream from upstairs.

Footsteps resonated loud and excruciating against the silent backdrop of the deserted station, barely softened by the glass cage.

Feverishly he checked the logs and the cameras, over and over, like he always did. The same static images stared back at him, betraying absolutely nothing of the source of the noises - nothing to confirm or deny that they were even real. He looked out to the dark room surrounding him, imploringly, the coiled lights and ligatures of the WAU staring back with an empty expression, the dark swellings of metal seeming to bend and contort under his intense scrutiny, almost mockingly.

He had to be imagining it.

Everyone at Omicron was dead.

They couldn’t be real.

By the time Ross came back to awareness again he's worried a valley into the layers of rotting muscle of his arm, revealing a fissure filled with gel and bone. He’s falling apart. He thought about his brain, or wherever it was that the WAU had stashed his consciousness, wondering if it was rotting inside his very skull like the rest of him - maybe that was why this was happening to him. What kind of thing would the WAU replace that with, he wondered?

His body trembled. He sucked himself into a deeper place to cope.

The screaming eventually stopped.

  
  


\- %%% -

The days blurred.

The computer tells him it's the 16th of April.

There was nothing. Ross tried to put a label on what he did or saw or read, but the memories tumbled over one another as if ripped pages from a book, left scattered, unordered - stripped from their contexts. The date was the only true point of reference. Even the simple rhythm of waking and sleep had broken down at some point. He'd either stopped sleeping or stopped noticing when he did - he wasn't sure whether it's because he doesn't need to, or if he was simply incapable of dreaming anymore. He's so, so unbearably hungry, for _anything,_ anything new and different that wasn't just four glass walls and the same server full of files. When he checked again, the days had elapsed into the 20th.

There were footsteps again, the sound iron and resonant like dragging feet. They come and go. Someone was crying, and he couldn't place the sound; he scrolled through the cameras again for something to fill the next minute with, the same sequence of images staring back at him as before.

The station shook. It did that a lot, recently, Ross thought; he supposed the station was beginning to fall apart.

_(Good.)_

Ross scratched at his face and his fingers flinched back as they met metal.

_This isn’t you_ _._ Ross repeated to himself, an internal mantra, as he traced the line of tubing that arced from cheek to shoulder, burying itself into his flesh at both ends. It was not the only one; tendrils radiated out of his skull and the girdle of shoulder and bent in all directions, skin raw and blistered. Maybe if he willed it into existance enough, he would still be him.

Like all the other times he'd tried to change everything, the truth would not bend.

He was being pulled in a thousand different directions at once.

_(His mind was failing, it was a trick of his eyes, or of the dim lights, or-)_

_He_ was Johan Ross _,_ but Johan Ross was a human man - a man he knew he'd recognize if he ever saw him again, pale skin and a gaunt, bearded face, short hair, and a million other tiny things. He wasn't sure who the twisted creature of WAU metal and melting flesh was, the thing that stared at him with dark and empty eye sockets - the walking corpse he'd predicted in his logs, weeks or months or years before. There were tubes and cables that would alight as if in bioluminescence that poured out of his gaping mouth, held stiff as if in a permanent, muffled scream. The lights would pulse and flash as if they were his heartbeat, filling his cell with a gentle, blue glow.

There was only so much structure gel to go around, and the if anything the WAU had been brutally efficient in it's replacement and repairwork. Where he'd tore and scratched at his skin in frustration and boredom it had been swiftly filled with one of the bulging, burrowing tubes that circulated gel or blood or electricity, or all three at once, arcing out of his flesh at unnatural angles.

When did this happen? How did he not notice that he was being picked apart and pulled back together, as the WAU tried desperately to repair all his bodies systems as they shut down again, one by one? He couldn't think back far enough, pinpoint the moment in time where he'd first realized that things were _off,_ that his stiff limbs would sometimes bend too much or not enough, or in the wrong direction ever so slightly - that he'd move and the sound would be unnatural to him, a grinding and a crunching and a wailing of metal on metal from beneath his skin. Had lying down been this uncomfortable from the beginning, or did that happen over time? When did he stop needing sleep?

What point had been the point of difference, of non-recognition and no return? Ross wished he could remember. It felt ridiculous that he couldn't, given the severity of the upheaveal his body had undergone. It had to have felt like _something,_ surely, to turn into a monster? If not, why _hadn't_ it felt like anything? If he was still a human in essence, in being, then why did he feel like he had lost something important, and not just his flesh?

The thing he was looking at was not Johan Ross, only a loose approximation of what Ross once was - a creature holding itself in the vague shape of a human being. A parody.

But the thing Ross was looking at was _him_ \- he just wasn't quite sure who or what that was any more.

\- %%% -

  
  


The routine was maddening, but it was consistent. Ross would check the logs, read back the final months and years of Omicron's history. Check the cameras - once, twice, and then again, as if flicking through a photo album. He'd walk around his cell. Maybe he would try and work out of the WAU had grown since he'd last looked. He looked at the date frequently, tried to guess what the time would be when he deigned to check next; he was frequently wrong. Time always crawled by slower than he wanted it to, or jumped forward by days without warning, and occasionally enough that it was still jarring when it happened. What would he even _do_ if the clocks broke down? They were the only thing that seemed real in Omicron anymore.

There was nothing else to do.

Was this what he deserved?

Ross just wanted it to be over. It wasn't even living by it's most flexible definition, or even just surviving; it was utterly mindless, a slow, inexorable crawl of time filled with nothing. Existing _hurt_ in a way he hadn't know it was possible to hurt, and he longed for even the thrill of fear he'd felt back in the abyss, or the aching despair of realizing he was going to be trapped forever, or even _horror_ at the creature he'd become.

_(Why couldn't he just die?)_

Who _was_ he?

His own body was falling to pieces around him. It was a foreign object of structure gel and putrefying flesh, kept ever stable by the shifting electric current that flowed through structure gel and skin - through the lattice of frayed nerve and circuitry that was now keeping him alive-

_(How was he still alive?)_

-and he found himself staring at his hands often, one of the few things he nearly recognized. The skin was discoloured, stretched tight over tendon and bone like tissue paper, but he could still look at them and feel like he was looking at something _human._ Ross looked at himself and wondered how he could've ever been human in the first place - been living inside a human body, when it now looked like this.

How could even he call it his any more, when there was almost nothing left that he recognized? When his own flesh peeled from the bone, his mind now capable of things that no other human was capable of, connected in a way that should've been impossible?

He tried to pinpoint what point had been the point of no return. He thought back to his death, his time spent comatose - how he’d felt altered but still human. He'd been able to reach out and connect to someone, grateful even then that he was experiencing anything at all. It was not how things were meant to be, or should've been, but with the promise of company eternity was a bearable prospect. It was a remarkable thing, to be anything at all.

But anyone left now was probably like him, or worse, like Strasky's mockingbird. Ross thought about if there was anyone else often - if it even mattered. He got up from the bed, ignoring the shrill grind of metal on metal as his joints bent and shifted.

He supposed it didn’t. He was grateful, in some ways, that there was no one to see him like this. Small mercies.

As if in defiance, the communications line in dispatch lit up, Upsilon demanding his attention. He felt no excitement this time - it was another mockingbird, certainly. He waited before answering, savouring the feeling of pity that overtook him, cavernous and aching in its fullness in a way it hadn’t been for a while. Ross wished there was something he could do for the others - he still felt responsible, despite everything he'd tried to prevent. He should've done more - he should've scaled the climber to the plateau himself when the communications dropped, should've fought more aggressively to be heard, _should've-_

He picked up. There was no voice on the other end this time.

“Kill yourself. There’s nothing left to live for.”

Ross hung up.

  
  


\- %%% -

  
It was rare anything of note happened since Ross was revived. So when there was another actual event so soon after it felt too abrupt to be a coincidence.

The flood of power from the substation back to the main entrance of Omicron was enough to make Ross jolt. The substation gurgled back to life, illuminating rows of new landmarks all around Omicron's exterior - it had been so long since he'd seen the outside of it properly that he'd forgotten the globes of fish stocks that lined up for research use in neat rows, now all emtpy.

Something had manually restored the power. Ross hesitated to believe that such a thing could even happen now - it couldn't possibly be real. Everyone was _dead_. He remembered the call from Upsilon, maybe days or hours before - May 12th, whenever that was supposed to be.

He shouldn't have dismissed the call as another mockingbird, stupid, _stupid_.

Ross rose up from where he’d been laying, beginning to pace around his cell in a nervous frenzy. They had an omnitool with them, whoever they were - whatever they were. They were messing with the computers - typing, reading, trying to get in. _God_ , they were trying to get in. They were trying to lift the quarantine.

It was like his brain was shortcircuiting, trying to bite back the feeling that was beginning to bubble up in his chest, suddenly so intense and overwhelming that he was unable to think straight. It was like trying to put a hand on a hot stove - checking the cameras was a terrifying prospect, afraid that the fragile hope would be shattered if he dared look. He wasn't sure if he could cope with another disappointment.

He opened up the video feed. The microseconds before the static twisted into shape lasted for years - monitors, a metal room. Two human bodies. One dead - propped against the control panel, head blown. Another victim of the blackbox surge.

One living.

The diving suit stood over the corpse as if in reverence for some time, before they walked from monitor to monitor; it seemed too good to be true - there they were, walking, breathing. Living. He couldn't believe it.

It could actually be a _person._

He would've wept if he were able to, but he couldn't afford to waste a second. He had one shot - Ross set out his bait, and he set it fast.

It was finally over.

\- 2828 2828 2828 2828 2828 2828 2828 2828-

Outside on the dead Earth, climbing over the metal corpse of the climber to the station's side entrance, Simon Jarrett entered Omicron.

**Author's Note:**

> Me, writing this: more like ship of thesaurus amirite ahahahahhahahahahah
> 
> While writing my other fic, I kept finding myself coming back to this period of Ross' pre game timeline, and ended up writing a liiiittle bit just to get it out of my system... And then before I knew it I had written 2000 words in a single sitting, which has never happened to me before. This has been sitting in my drafts long enough that it's nearly going to expire again, so off it goes.
> 
> I've tried my best to line up with the existing canon, but as you can probably tell I've liberally filled the gaps with my own headcanons. I included Strasky's mockingbird that you can contact from Upsilon near the start of the game, as well as Ross' dialogue if you call Omicron instead of Lambda, as I really liked those little details. I found the dream-stuff mentions in canon interesting, though I found it difficult to include in this fic in a way that I was happy with and felt natural, though I didn't want to ignore it outright.
> 
> I'm sure none of you can guess which character I have had a hyperfixation on lately. Who knows who it could be. Anyway, thank you for reading! \o/


End file.
